Extended free-space optical communications

This thesis investigates the performance of free-space optical (FSO) communication systems in a turbulent atmosphere employing optical amplifiers (OAs) to extend transmission reach and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) to improve capacity. This system performance is considered in the presence of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise, scintillation, beam spreading, atmospheric attenuation and interchannel crosstalk. In this work, the modulation scheme used is the on-off keying non-return-to-zero and the main performance metric employed is the average bit error rate (BER). Various performance evaluation methods are used to estimate system performance.\ud Analysis of single link, cascaded OA and WDM FSO communication systems are given and the implications of using both adaptive (to channel state) and non-adaptive decision threshold schemes are analysed. The benefits of amplifier saturation, for example in the form of effective scintillation reduction when a non-adaptive decision threshold scheme is utilised at the receiver for different atmospheric turbulence regimes, are presented. Monte Carlo simulation techniques are used to model the probability distributions of system parameters such as the optical signal power, amplified spontaneous emission noise, optical signal to noise ratio and the average bit error rate due to scintillation.\ud It is found that the performance of an adaptive decision threshold is superior to a non-adaptive decision threshold for both saturated and fixed gain preamplified receivers and the ability of a saturated gain OA to suppress scintillation is only meaningful for system performance when a non-adaptive decision threshold is used at the receiver. In a saturated gain preamplified system, the optimum non-adaptive decision threshold is investigated.\ud An OA cascade can be successfully used to extend reach in FSO communication systems and specific system implementations are presented. The optimal cascade scheme with a non-adaptive receiver would use frequent low gain saturated amplification although this has a cost implication. Furthermore, a saturated gain amplified WDM FSO system with a non-adaptive decision threshold is superior to a non-amplified WDM FSO system with an adaptive decision threshold